The General Religion, Mythology, and Theology Thread

What may be the world's oldest fragments of the Koran have been found by the University of Birmingham. Radiocarbon dating found the manuscript to be at least 1,370 years old, making it among the earliest in existence. The pages of the Muslim holy text had remained unrecognised in the university library for almost a century.

The British Library's expert on such manuscripts, Dr Muhammad Isa Waley, said this "exciting discovery" would make Muslims "rejoice". The manuscript had been kept with a collection of other Middle Eastern books and documents, without being identified as one of the oldest fragments of the Koran in the world.

When a Ph D researcher looked more closely at these pages it was decided to carry out a radiocarbon dating test and the results were "startling". The University's director of special collections, Susan Worrall, said researchers had not expected "in our wildest dreams" that it would be so old.

"Finding out we had one of the oldest fragments of the Koran in the whole world has been fantastically exciting."

The tests, carried out by the Oxford University Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, showed that the fragments, written on sheep or goat skin, were among the very oldest surviving texts of the Koran. These tests provide a range of dates, showing that, with a probability of more than 95%, the parchment was from between 568 and 645.

"They could well take us back to within a few years of the actual founding of Islam," said David Thomas, the university's professor of Christianity and Islam. "According to Muslim tradition, the Prophet Muhammad received the revelations that form the Koran, the scripture of Islam, between the years 610 and 632, the year of his death."

Prof Thomas says the dating of the Birmingham folios would mean it was quite possible that the person who had written them would have been alive at the time of the Prophet Muhammad. "The person who actually wrote it could well have known the Prophet Muhammad. He would have seen him probably, he would maybe have heard him preach. He may have known him personally - and that really is quite a thought to conjure with," he says.

Prof Thomas says that some of the passages of the Koran were written down on parchment, stone, palm leaves and the shoulder blades of camels - and a final version, collected in book form, was completed in about 650.

Studies show the remaining Christians in most - but not all - of the Middle East are in dire straits.

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The dire fate of the Christian communities in the Middle East has become headline news lately. The murderous civil war in Syria; the rise of the Islamic State; the turmoil in countries such as Iraq, Libya, and in North Africa; as well as the anti-Christian Islamic regimes in places such as Iran, where the Christian population has almost vanished - as in Turkey; have led to a mass exodus of Christians in the best case, and enslavement and genocide in the worst.

Christians now face the worst religious persecution in over a thousand years in the Middle East, reports Christianity Today, based on a study conducted by the Pew Research Center.

Last week the New York Times Magazine ran a major article detailing the plight of Christians in the Middle East, saying about a third of the 600,000 Syrian Christians have already fled, and only about a third of Iraq's 1.5 million Christians in 2003 remain today. The Times asks whether this is the end for the Christian community in the Middle East, and whether it has any future in the region of its birth.

"Christianity is under an existential threat," Anna Eshoo, a Democrat member of the US House of Representatives from California, and an advocate of Mideast Christians, told the Times.

A recent report from the British Guardian newspaper pointed out that the persecution of Christians started not with ISIS, but 10 years ago after the US- and British-led invasion of Iraq. Prior to the invasion, "under Saddam Hussein's rule, Christians in fact enjoyed what they now recall as a golden age. They were free to worship and played a full role in society. However, the removal of the dictator let loose an ugly Shia-Sunni power struggle," The Guardian wrote.

Israel, and at least for now Lebanon, are the only countries left in the Middle East where Christians have freedom to practice their religion and are safe from persecution. But the Lebanese Christian population has shrunken from 78 percent to only 34 percent over the last century.

Interestingly enough, the Pew report from April says the strict Islamic nations of the Gulf states, such as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, are seeing an influx of Christians. But these are almost totally migrant workers from Asia, who often have very few rights and are supposedly only living there temporarily - and do not have full rights of freedom of religion.

"While emigration out of the Middle East and North Africa is projected to lower the share of Christians in countries such as Egypt, Iraq and Syria, the immigration of Christians into the GCC countries is expected to more than offset these departures for the region overall.

"Thus, migration is expected to slow the projected decline in the Christian share of the population in the Middle East-North Africa region. If migration were not factored into the 2050 projections, the estimated Christian share of the region’s population would drop below 3%. With migration factored in, however, the estimated Christian share is just above 3% (compared with nearly 4% as of 2010)," states the Pew report.

The report also forecasts that Muslims will outnumber Christians around the world sometime in the second half of this century.